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HP Enters Public Cloud Services Market -- In Beta
Company inching closer toward fulling its promise of a public cloud service.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is inching closer toward fulling its promise of a public cloud service. Today the company announced it is providing early access (via a private beta test) to select testers for its forthcoming Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) portfolio. The service will compete with IaaS offerings from Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, among others. CEO Leo Apotheker announced HP's plans to enter the public cloud services business in March at a strategy briefing for analysts.
HP's beta launch comes just one week after Dell kicked off a beta program for its first private cloud service, Dell Cloud, which is built on VMware's vCloud Datacenter Services.
Emil Sayegh, vice president of cloud services at HP, offered readers to apply for the private beta program in a blog post, where he revealed the first two services the company will offer would be HP Cloud Compute (which allows customers to deploy compute instances on-demand much like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)) and HP Cloud Object Storage, which provides scalable online storage on-demand, targeted at archiving, data backup, serving static content for Web apps, and storing large data sets including online files and media. HP Cloud Object Storage will compete with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). Prospective beta testers can register here.
"At HP Cloud Services, our goal is to provide the next generation of cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, and businesses of all sizes," Sayegh said. "We recognize that public cloud services should be open and transparent from end-to-end across APIs, infrastructure and software stack."
The infrastructure supports integration with the open source OpenStack platform through a Web-based graphical user interface and RESTful application programming interfaces, he said. HP joined the OpenStack project in late July.
"We believe that by working closely with the developer community and combining the best open source technologies with HP's hardware and software portfolio, we can create the right mix of capabilities that deliver best customer experience," Sayegh added.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.